We All Know What "Vegetation Management" Means
I went about twenty minutes away from my house for the summer.
In all fairness, I do live in a pretty amazing place. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to a huge amount of diversity, with lots of species found nowhere else on Earth, more rainfall than anywhere else in the country outside of Mt. Olympus in Washington, blah blah blah I'm the child of a trail guide and can't turn it off. So for my internship I decided to spend the summer living in Park housing at Sugarlands, the area of the Park closest to my hometown. (Not that I wouldn't have gone elsewhere in the Park, it just happens to be where I ended up.) When I say close to my hometown, I mean literally two miles outside of the Gatlinburg city limits, which if you've ever been to Gatlinburg are only maybe four miles away from the city limits at the other end. I'm a Volunteer Intern Ranger Stupid Question Answerer. That's the official title. We get a uniform and everything.
Monday morning of training week, I got up earlier than God himself, stumbled around while trying to still maintain a decent image for my shiny brand new housemate, Emily, and somehow managed to find my way to the dungeon training area in the basement of the Sugarlands Visitor Center. I didn't really have too much time to form any preconceived notions of this job, but I sure as hell didn't expect what I got. The starting gun went off and a motely crew made up mostly of awkward and oddly shaped people shuffled into the room and took their seats, and I surveyed each of them as they sat. (First impressions aside, they're all okay, with some exceptions being absolutely awesome). Seasonal rangers, interns, and volunteers alike all have to go through the same training, so a lot of the people I met that day would be my partners in crime (or upholding government standards, whatever) for the whole summer. We played the mandatory icebreaker game, and learned not to say “shit” in front of visitors. So far so good.
The rest of the day consisted of presentation after presentation, with varying levels of crippling boredom. Being a local, often the things being said were common sense to me, and I had to constantly remind myself of the others in the room from less awesome states like Texas who had never been to the Smokies before. One presenter stood out, basing her presentation on an acronym (government people fucking LOVE acronyms (almost as much as I fucking love parentheses)). Her acronym started off with S-R-E, and a quick sweep around the room confirmed that everyone was working just as hard as I was to figure out the remaining letters. Like Wheel of Fortune only without winning, Vanna White, or, you know, a Wheel of Fortune. Enthusiastic Lady finished off her SRE with a W, and all hell broke loose (quietly). Upon discussion with others later, I found out that she was the kind of woman who would never even consider the implications of the acronym SREW, but just to make it painfully clear, another ranger stood up afterwards and suggested that Communications be added to Stewardship, Research, Education, and Wombats (or something like that), but she just nodded, confused, and we went about our day.
The remaining days went by without much incident, mostly filled with confirmation that the people I was working with excel at being obscenely awesome, interspersed with falling asleep during PowerPoint presentations, hanging out with a man who looks just like Santa (who also introduces himself as Santa), and making inside jokes about elk bugle sounds. Win.
The winner of all presentations (which if you've paid attention at all to the above paragraphs you'll realize is not necessarily the most difficult title to achieve) was definitely our cultural stereotypes lecture. Basically people who come to the area have horrible ideas of the toothless, shoeless, pregnant, uneducated, religious zealot moonshining hillbilly. While not all of those traits are wrapped up in one person (generally), they do have some basis in fact. Southern Appalachians have a long history of being dirt poor workers of the land, with no dental and often limited contraceptive options. I personally was taught abstinence only sex education, which included completely fabricated statistics about birth control causing cancer in 80% of users, condoms being basically useless, and one abortion completely destroying your reproductive system (not to mention your chances at getting into Heaven).
Anyway. Back to the greatest presentation of all time. We started out listening to a jaunty little tune about incest, followed by a low budget documentary about a local moonshiner named Jim Tom. The material was so awesome that I took my first (and so far only) notes for the entire week so that I would have pristine quotes for later enjoyment. The movie starts out focused on an old man driving a car that completely redefined my idea of the word “ghetto” who spells out M-O-O-N-S-H-I-N-E in Morse Code on his car horn. Already I could tell that this was going to be the greatest thing of all time. Within the first three minutes of the film, while Jim Tom is driving around his hometown, he pulls out his personal breathalyzer and gives it a good blow. After making sure that he is still within the legal limit (we assume, though he is honestly such a ridiculous human being that he may be breathalyzing himself to make sure he is above the legal limit, and therefore maintaining his status of being fucking crazy), he cackles to himself and begins to tell the audience stories about his childhood, where he started off at his first job working “for one quart of moonshine a day.” Really. This man started out his life in the workforce with minimum wage being a full quart of illegal alcohol a day. He then takes us through the process of making moonshine, testing it liberally, and saying, “If you take two, three sips of that you won't have to have no music, you'll just start dancing 'cause you'll hear it!” This alcohol is so strong that two or three sips will make you hallucinate, and I'll hazard a guess and say that dancing to nonexistent music will probably be the very least of your problems. We meet some of Jim Tom's friends, including man who gives us such gems as “I'm an ordained Bible minister. And I like to make a little moonshine” and “Noo-ey (Noah of the Bible) made him some wine and got drunk, and Apostle Paul warned them women about getting drunk. What was makin' em drunk? Alky-hawl! (This is drunk-off-your-ass Tennesseean for 'alcohol').” Jim Tom spends the rest of the film dumpster diving and playing an accordion he found during one of his dumpster adventures, and the film fades to credits as Jim Tom drunkenly warbles “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” to said accordion.
Though nothing could come close to following that with any success, the rest of the week consisted of a huge picnic with literally the entire Park Service, during which I awkwardly saw a large amount of the pompous assholes who made my time in grade school almost as fun as trying to get Jim Tom to fill out a tax form, and was delighted to find that the worst one of the bunch had put on a ton of weight (I mean, if I went to Vandy I'd eat myself into a diabetic coma too) and hadn't gone any farther from home for the summer than I had. Other highlights included meeting a Jake Gyllenhaal look-alike during our trip to Park Fisheries and making as much eye contact with him as possibly without fearing a restraining order (which, as it turns out, adds up to a lot of eye contact). Emily and I will be taking a trip to Fisheries soon. We also burned cookies and brought them over to our neighbors' house, meeting half a dozen Vegetation Management guys (with a profound love of...vegetation) and somehow managing to talk about porn within only twenty minutes of arriving. So far I'd say life here ranks about a 9.Awesome from a scale of 1 to Awesome, my only complaint being that no self respecting college student should ever have to see 7 AM, especially not in the summertime. But hey, it beats spending all day getting coffee for self-important corporate assholes like other interns, right?
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